Buying Art: Root and Branch

By Emily Tobin

13 January 2016

Emily Tobin profiles three
artists who reflect on trees and their place in the wider landscape
through a range of mediums

From the inception of Western painting, artists have
depicted trees. This proliferated in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries as they became more concerned with
the realistic portrayal ofthe natural word. Later Constable
delighted in the subject matter, painting and
drawing the trees near his house in Hampstead as singular
subjects.

After his infamous ear incident, Van
Gogh spent a year at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy. While his
mental state continued to decline, painting provided a constant.
Doctors, hallways, flowers and wheat fields were all set to canvas,
but one particularly evocative painting was his depiction of a
solitary mulberry tree in the hospital garden: a swirling mass of
chrome-yellow leaves growing from a rocky bluff. David Hockney has
repeated the motif, from palm trees to felled trees to shady
tunnels of trees. Beyond their decorative attributes, trees have
been used allegorically throughout the centuries, hinting at
more important meanings that the viewer must detect - as these
contemporary artists demonstrate.

Julian Perry

'My interest in trees is as
signifiers,' says Julian Perry of his hyperrealist paintings. 'My
work is concerned with what the landscape can show us about
ourselves. This can be positive - the creation of wildlife habitats
- and negative - the effects of airborne pollutants.' He has
examined the consequences of pollarding and coppicing and his works
at this year's Venice Biennale explore 'the effects of climate
change as embodied in
increased rates of coastal erosion'. Silver birch trees are
captured at the moment they topple over the cliffs of Benacre in
Suffolk. Their exposed roots, ripped from the ground, bear clumps
of earth and patches of grass; the vast scale of these add to the
sense of violence and turbulence.

William Kentridge

For South African-born William
Kentridge, landscapes started off as an incidental element in other
drawings: 'A window behind a couple dancing, an open space behind a
portrait. Gradually the landscape took over and flooded the
interiors. Few people in the pictures managed to retain their place
in them.' Trees are a recurring image; they are depicted in
expressionistic charcoal and pastel, and in calligraphic ink
drawings, which are painted on encyclopedia pages, torn up and
reassembled. There are regal trees with dense foliage, vast trunks
that have been rent in two and spindly trees confined within formal
hedges; the landscape is not simply a bucolic idea but it is a tool
for political analysis. A set of works recently displayed at the
Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition examined Nelson Mandela's 1956
treason trial, where his father, Sydney Kentridge, defended
Mandela.

Anna Harley

'I had a rather nomadic early
childhood,' says Anna Harley. 'By the age of six, I had lived on
three different continents, so trees represent the security,
consistency and permanence I missed out on when I was young.' Anna
comes from a long line of artists - the Swedish landscape artists
Maja and Gustaf Fjaestad and Fritz Lindström are among her
ancestors - but it is Peter Doig's semi-urban landscapes that have
had the most impact on her practice. Anna's screen prints verge on
the abstract; her tree forms are often cropped or focus on the
silhouettes and negative spaces between the branches. 'I try to let
each print evolve, allowing it to take on a life of its own and
capitalising on happy accidents as they happen.' Her work is
characterised by the metallic inks she uses and a muted colour
palette. 'I particularly love trees in winter when the sculptural
forms of the boughs are exposed; they have a wonderful haunting
quality.'